This invention relates to data storage and accessing, and more particularly to automatic file searching and accessing.
Nowadays, a great many computers can communicate with one another over networks. One such network is the Internet, the use of which has expanded greatly in recent years (and is expected to continue). One significant way in which the Internet is used is the World Wide Web (also referred to as the xe2x80x9cwebxe2x80x9d), which is a collection of documents (referred to as simply xe2x80x9cweb pagesxe2x80x9d) that users can view or otherwise render and which typically include links to one or more other pages that the user can access. These web documents are typically stored as one or more files at a remote location, being accessed by a user via his or her computer and the Internet.
Web pages are accessed for a wide variety of different reasons. By way of example, web pages may be accessed to test a web browser (an application program that manages the rendering of web pages to a user). By way of another example, web pages may be accessed by a user to view information he or she is interested in (e.g., an audio and/or video program, information describing products or services that a company offers, etc.).
Unfortunately, the selection and loading of web pages is currently a largely manual process. For example, selection of a set of web pages that are to be used to test a web browser is performed by a user manually typing in the paths and names of each web page in the test set. These web page identifiers are then individually selected by the user to access the identified page (causing the web browser to load the page and thereby test proper operation of the browser). By way of another example, a web search engine may identify multiple web pages that match a set of search criteria, but the user is then required to access each of the resulting web pages manually. Such manual processes, however, can be tedious and time-consuming on the part of the user, as well as error-prone.
The invention described below addresses these disadvantages, providing automatic file searching and accessing.
Automatic file searching and accessing is described herein.
In accordance with one aspect, given a destination(s) and search criteria, the destination(s) is searched to identify web pages that satisfy the search criteria. For each such web page, an identifier (such as a uniform resource locator (URL)) of the web page is added to a reference page. One or more of the individual web pages can then be accessed by selecting the corresponding identifier from the reference page.
In accordance with another aspect, a list of file identifiers (e.g., such as those included on a reference page) is used to automatically access the corresponding files. During the automatic accessing process, the list of file identifiers is parsed and the corresponding files accessed one by one. A variety of different actions can be taken in accessing a file, such as displaying the contents of the file to the user and/or saving the contents of the file to a local storage device for subsequent usage.